From The Verbal Icon:Studies in the Meaning of Poetry.W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley.Lexington:University of Kentucky Press, 1954.

THE CLAIM of the author's "intention" upon the critic's
judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions, notably in
the debate entitled The Personal
Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard.
But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are
as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a short
article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary1of
literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its
implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author
is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a
work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes
deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes. It is a
principle which accepted or rejected points to the polar opposites of
classical "imitation" and romantic expression. It entails many
specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history
and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its
allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the
critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention."

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"Intention," as we shall use the term, corresponds
to what he intended in a formula
which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. "In order to
judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the author's
mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his
work, the way he felt, what made him write.

We begin our discussion with a series of propositions
summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.

1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The
words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out
of a bat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is
not to grant the design or intention as a standard
by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.

2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the
question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If
the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying
to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence,
and the critic must go outside the poem‑for evidence of an intention
that did not become effective in the poem. "Only one caveat must be
borne in mind," says an eminent intentionalist2 in a moment
when his theory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the
moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem
itself."

3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine.
One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer
the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not mean but be." A
poem can be only through its
meaning‑since its medium is words‑yet it is, simply is, in the
sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.
Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at
once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is
relevant; what is irrevelant has been excluded,
like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery.

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In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which
are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more
abstract than poetry.

4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in
the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a
physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the
response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no
matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of
the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker,
and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.

5. There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may
better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He
intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now
has done it. But it follows that his former concrete intention was not his
intention. "He's the man we were in search of, that's true," says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man
we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we
wanted."

"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a
judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the
author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the
constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately
diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is
yet different. The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is
detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power
to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is
embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about
the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the poem is
subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the
general science of psychology.

A critic of our Dictionary
article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,
has argued3 that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of
art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the work of
art "ought ever to have been undertaken

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at all" and so "whether it
is worth preserving." Number (2), Coomaraswamy
maintains, is not "criticism of any work of art qua work of art,"
but is rather moral criticism; number (1) is artistic criticism. But we
maintain that (2) need not be moral criticism: that there is another way of
deciding whether works of art are worth preserving and whether, in a sense,
they "ought" to have been undertaken, and this is the way of
objective criticism of works of art as such, the way which enables us to
distinguish between a skillful murder and a skillful poem. A skillful murder
is an example which Coomaraswamy uses, and in his
system the difference between the murder and the poem is simply a
"moral" one, not an "artistic" one, since each if carried
out according to plan is "artistically" successful. We maintain
that (2) is an inquiry of more worth than (1), and since (2) and not (1) is
capable of distinguishing poetry from murder, the name "artistic
criticism" is properly given to (2).

II

It is not so much a historical
statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic
one. When a rhetorician of the first century A.D. writes: "Sublimity is the
echo of a great soul," or when he tells us that "Homer enters into
the sublime actions of his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration
of the combat," we shall not be surprised to find this rhetorician
considered as a distant harbinger of romanticism and greeted in the warmest
terms by Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether Longinus should be called romantic, but there can hardly
be a doubt that in one important way he is.

Goethe's three questions for
"constructive criticism" are "What did the author set out to
do? Was his plan reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed in
carrying it out?" If one leaves out the middle question, one has in
effect the system of Croce‑the culmination and crowning philosophic
expression of romanticism. The beautiful is the successful intuition‑expression,
and the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art is the aesthetic fact, and the medium or
public part is not the subject of aesthetic at all.

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The Madonna of Cimabue is still in
the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but does she speak to the visitor
of to‑day as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century?

Historical
interpretation labours . . . to reintegrate in us the psychological conditions
which have changed in the course of history. It . . . enables us to see a
work of art (a physical object) as its author
saw it in the moment of production.4

The first italics are Croce's, the second ours. The upshot
of Croce's system is an ambiguous emphasis on history. With such passages as
a point of departure a critic may write a nice analysis of the meaning or
"spirit" of a play by Shakespeare or Corneille‑a
process that involves close historical study but remains aesthetic criticism‑or
he may, with equal plausibility, produce an essay in sociology, biography, or
other kinds of nonaesthetic history.

III.

I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts....
I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and
asked what was the meaning of them. . . . Will you
believe me? . . . there is hardly a person present
who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves.
Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius
and inspiration.

That reiterated mistrust of the poets
which we hear from Socrates may have been part of a rigorously ascetic view
in which we hardly wish to participate, yet Plato's Socrates saw a truth
about the poetic mind which the world no longer commonly sees‑so much
criticism, and that the most inspirational and most affectionately
remembered, has proceeded from the poets themselves.

Certainly the poets have had something to say that the
critic and professor could not say; their message has been more exciting:
that poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree, that poetry is the
lava of the imagination, or that it is emotion recollected in tranquillity. But it is necessary that we realize the
character and authority of such testimony. There

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is only a fine shade of difference
between such expressions and a kind of earnest advice that authors often
give. Thus Edward Young, Carlyle, Walter Pater:

I know two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. 1. Know thyself; 2dly, Reverence thyself.

This is the grand secret for finding
readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be
first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Sivis me flere, is
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every
writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed.

Truth! there
can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in
the long run only fineness of
truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that
vision within.

And Housman's
little handbook to the poetic mind yields this illustration:

Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon‑beer is a
sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion
of my life‑I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went
along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me
and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind,
with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse,
sometimes a whole stanza at once.

This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted.
Here is a confession of how poems were written which would do as a definition
of poetry just as well as "emotion recollected in tranquillity"‑and
which the young poet might equally well take to heart as a practical rule.
Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look
at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own
soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraieverité.

It is probably true that all this is
excellent advice for poets. The young imagination fired by Wordsworth and
Carlyle is probably closer to the verge of producing a poem than the mind

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of the student who has been sobered by
Aristotle or Richards. The art of inspiring poets, or at least of inciting
something like poetry in young persons, has probably gone further in our day
than ever before. Books of creative writing such as those issued from the
Lincoln School are interesting evidence of what a child can do.5
All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism‑to
a psychological discipline, a system of self‑development, a yoga, which
the young poet perhaps does well to notice, but which is something different
from the public art of evaluating poems.

Coleridge and Arnold were better
critics than most poets have been, and if the critical tendency dried up the
poetry in Arnold and perhaps in Coleridge, it is not
inconsistent with our argument, which is that judgment of poems is different
from the art of producing them. Coleridge has given us the classic
"anodyne" story, and tells what he can about the genesis of a poem
which he calls a "psychological curiosity," but his definitions of
poetry and of the poetic quality "imagination" are
to be found elsewhere and in quite other terms.

It would be convenient if the
passwords of the intentional school, "sincerity,"
"fidelity," "spontaneity, I'll authenticity,"
"genuineness," "originality," could be equated with terms
such as "integrity," "relevance," "unity,"
"function," "maturity," "subtlety ... .. adequacy," and other more precise terms of evaluation
‑in short, if "expression" always meant aesthetic
achievement. But this is not so.

"Aesthetic" art, says
Professor Curt Ducasse, an ingenious theorist of
expression, is the conscious objectification of feelings, in which an
intrinsic part is the critical moment. The artist corrects the
objectification when it is not adequate. But this may mean that the earlier
attempt was not successful in objectifying the self, or "it may also
mean that it was a successful objectification of a self which, when it
confronted us clearly, we disowned and repudiated in favor of another."6
What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self? Professor Ducasse does not say. Whatever it may be, however, this
standard is an element in the definition of art which will not

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reduce to terms of objectification. The
evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against
something outside the author.

IV

There is criticism of poetry and
there is author psychology, which when applied to the present or future takes
the form of inspirational promotion; but author psychology can be historical
too, and then we have literary biography, a legitimate and attractive study
in itself, one approach, as Professor Tillyard
would argue, to personality, the poem being only a parallel approach.
Certainly it need not be with a derogatory purpose that one points out
personal studies, as distinct from poetic studies, in the realm of literary
scholarship. Yet there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies;
and there is the fault of writing the personal as if it were poetic.

There is a difference between
internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem. And the paradox is
only verbal and superficial that what is (1) internal is also public: it is
discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual
knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the
literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that
makes a language and culture; while what is (2) external is private or
idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of
revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations)
about how or why the poet wrote the poem‑to what lady, while sitting on
what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother. There is (3) an
intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about
private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or
by a coterie of which he is a member. The meaning of words is the history of
words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the
associations which the word had for him, are part of the words history and
meaning.7 But the three types of evidence, especially (2) and (3),
shade into one another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line
between examples,

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and hence arises the difficulty for
criticism. The use of biographical evidence need not involve intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what
the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and
the dramatic character of his utterance. On the other hand, it may not be all
this. And a critic who is concerned with evidence of type (1) and moderately
with that of type (3) will in the long run produce a different sort of
comment from that of the critic who is concerned with (2) and with (3) where
it shades into (2).

The whole glittering parade of
Professor Lowes' Road to Xanadu, for instance, runs
along the border between types (2) and (3) or boldly traverses the romantic
region of (2). "'Kubla Khan,"' says
Professor Lowes, "is the fabric of a vision,
but every image that rose up in its weaving had passed that way before. And
it would seem that there is nothing haphazard or fortuitous in their
return." This is not quite clear‑not even when Professor Lowes explains that there were clusters of associations,
like hooked atoms, which were drawn into complex relation with other clusters
in the deep well of Coleridge's memory, and which then coalesced and issued
forth as poems. If there was nothing "haphazard or fortuitous" in
the way the images returned to the surface, that may mean (1) that Coleridge
could not produce what he did not have, that he was limited in his creation
by what he had read or otherwise experienced, or (2) that having received
certain clusters of associations, he was bound to return them in just the way
he did, and that the value of the poem may be described in terms of the
experiences on which he had to draw. The latter pair of propositions (a sort
of Hartleyanassociationism
which Coleridge himself repudiated in the Biographia) may not be assented to. There were certainly other
combinations, other poems, worse or better, that
might have been written by men who had read Bartram
and Purchas and Bruce and Milton. And this will be
true no matter how many times we are able to add to the brilliant complex of
Coleridge's reading. In certain flourishes (such as the sentence we have
quoted) and in chapter headings like "The Shaping Spirit,"
"The Magical Synthesis," "Imagination

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Creatrix," it may be that Professor Lowes pretends to say more about the actual poems than he
does. There is a certain deceptive variation in these fancy chapter titles;
one expects to pass on to a new stage in the argument, and one finds‑more
and more sources, more and more about "the streamy
nature of association ."8

"WohinderWeg?" quotes
Professor Lowes for the motto of his book. "KeinWeg! Ins Unbetretene." Precisely because the way is unbetreten, we should say, it leads away from
the poem. Bartram'sTravels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and
of certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear in "Kubla Khan." And a good deal of that history has
passed and was then passing into the very stuff of our language. Perhaps a
person who has read Bartrarn appreciates the poem
more than one who has not. Or, by looking up the vocabulary of "Kubla Khan" in the Oxford English Dictionary, or by reading some of the other books
there quoted, a person may know the poem better. But it would seem to pertain
little to the poem to know that Coleridge
had read Bartram. There is a gross body of
life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies
behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be
known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For
all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an
action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context‑or indeed
we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about.

It is probable that there is nothing
in Professor Lowes' vast book which could detract
from anyone's appreciation of either The
Ancient Mariner or "Kubla Khan." We
next present a case where preoccupation with evidence of type (3) has gone so
far as to distort a critic's view of a poem (yet a case not so obvious as those that abound in our critical journals).

In a well known poem by John Donne
appears this quatrain:

Moving of th'earth brings harmes and feares,

Men reckon what it
did and meant,

But trepidation of the spheares,

Though greater farre, is innocent.

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A recent critic in an elaborate treatment of Donne's
learning has written of this quatrain as follows:

He touches the emotional pulse of the situation by a
skillful allusion to the new and the old astronomy.... Of the new astronomy, the ,'moving of the earth" is the most radical
principle; of the old, the "trepidation of the spheres" is the
motion of the greatest complexity. ... The poet must exhort his love to
quietness and calm upon his departure; and for this purpose the figure based
upon the latter motion (trepidation), long absorbed into the traditional
astronomy, fittingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing the harmes and feares"
implicit in the figure of the moving earth.

The argument is plausible and rests on a well substantiated
thesis that Donne was deeply interested in the new astronomy and its
repercussions in the theological realm. In various works Donne shows his
familiarity with Kepler'sDe Stella Nova, with Galileo's SideriusNuncius, with William Gilbert's De Magnete, and
with Clavius' commentary on the De Sphaeraof
Sacrobosco. He refers to the new science in his
Sermon at Paul's Cross and in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer.
In The First Anniversary he says
the "new philosophy calls all in doubt.' In the Elegy on Prince Henry he says that the "least moving of the
center" makes "the world to shake."

It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible
to answer it with evidence of like nature. There is no reason why Donne might
not have written a stanza in which the two kinds of celestial motion stood
for two sorts of emotion at parting. And if we become full of astronomical
ideas and see Donne only against the background of the new science, we may
believe that he did. But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the
analyzable vehicle of a complicated metaphor. And one may observe: (1) that
the movement of the earth according to the Copernican theory is a celestial
motion, smooth and regular, and while it might cause religious or philosophic
fears, it could not be associated with the crudity and earthiness of the kind
of commotion which the speaker in the poem wishes to discourage; (2) that
there is another moving of the earth, an earthquake, which has just these
qualities and is to be associated

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with the tear‑floods and sigh‑tempests of the
second stanza of the poem; (3) that "trepidation" is an appropriate
opposite of earthquake, because each is a shaking or vibratory motion; and
"trepidation of the spheres" is "greater far" than an
earthquake, but not much greater (if two such motions can be compared as to
greatness) than the annual motion of the earth; (4) that reckoning what it
"did and meant" shows that the event has passed, like an
earthquake, not like the incessant celestial movement of the earth. Perhaps a knowledge of Donne's interest in the new science may add
another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to
say even this runs against the words. To make the geocentric and heliocentric
antithesis the core of the metaphor is to disregard the English language, to
prefer private evidence to public, external to internal.

V

If the distinction between kinds of
evidence has implications for the historical critic, it has them no less for
the contemporary poet and his critic. Or, since every rule for a poet is but
another side of a judgment by a critic, and since the past is the realm of
the scholar and critic, and the future and present that of the poet and the
critical leaders of taste, we may say that the problems arising in literary
scholarship from the intentional fallacy are matched by others which arise in
the world of progressive experiment.

The question of "allusiveness," for example, as
acutely posed by the poetry of Eliot, is certainly one where a false judgment
is likely to involve the intentional fallacy. The frequency and depth of
literary allusion in the poetry of Eliot and others has driven so many in
pursuit of full meanings to the Golden
Bough and the Elizabethan drama that it has become a kind of commonplace
to suppose that we do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in
his reading‑a supposition redolent with intentional implications. The
stand taken by F. 0. Matthiessen is a sound one and
partially forestalls the difficulty.

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If one reads these lines with an
attentive ear and is sensitive to their sudden shifts in movement, the
contrast between the actual Thames and the idealized vision of it during an
age before it flowed through a megalopolis is sharply conveyed by that movement
itself, whether or not one recognizes the refrain to be from Spenser.

Eliot's allusions work when we know
them‑and to a great extent even when we do not know them, through their
suggestive power.

But sometimes we find allusions
supported by notes, and it is a nice question whether the notes function more
as guides to send us where we may be educated, or more as indications in
themselves about the character of the allusions. "Nearly everything of
importance ... that is apposite to an appreciation of 'The Waste Land,"'
writes Matthiessen of Miss Weston's book; "has
been incorporated into the structure of the poem itself, or into Eliot's
Notes." And with such an admission it may begin to appear that it would
not much matter if Eliot invented his sources (as Sir Walter Scott invented
chapter epigraphs from 11 old plays" and "anonymous" authors,
or as Coleridge wrote marginal glosses for The Ancient Mariner). Allusions to Dante, Webster, Marvell, or
Baudelaire doubtless gain something because these writers existed, but it is
doubtful whether the same can be said for an allusion to an obscure
Elizabethan:

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to
Mrs. Porter in the spring.

"Cf. Day, Parliament
of Bees:" says Eliot,

When of a sudden, listening, you
shall hear, A noise of horns and hunting, which
shall bring Actaeon to Diana in the spring, Mere
all shall see her naked skin.

The irony is completed by the
quotation itself; had Eliot, as is quite conceivable, composed these lines to
furnish his own background, there would be no loss of validity. The
conviction may grow as one reads Eliot's next note: "I do not know the
origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was

15

reported to me from Sydney, Australia." The important word in this
note‑on Mrs. Porter and her daughter who washed their feet in soda
water‑is "ballad." And if one should feel from the lines
themselves their "ballad" quality, there would be little need for
the note. Ultimately, the inquiry must focus on the integrity of such notes
as parts of the poem, for where they constitute special information about the
meaning of phrases in the poem, they ought to be
subject to the same scrutiny as any of the other words in which it is
written. Matthiessen believes the notes were the
price Eliot "had to pay in order to avoid what he would have considered
muffling the energy of his poem by extended connecting links in the text
itself." But it may be questioned whether the notes and the need for
them are not equally muffling. F. W. Bateson has
plausibly argued that Tennyson's "The Sailor Boy" would be better
if half the stanzas were omitted, and the best versions of ballads like
"Sir Patrick Spens" owe their power to
the very audacity with which the minstrel has taken for granted the story
upon which he comments. What then if a poet finds he cannot take so much for
granted in a more recondite context and rather than write informatively,
supplies notes? It can be said in favor of this plan that at least the notes
do not pretend to be dramatic, as they would if written in verse. On the
other hand, the notes may look like unassimilated material lying loose beside
the poem, necessary for the meaning of the verbal symbol, but not integrated,
so that the symbol stands incomplete.

We mean to suggest by the above analysis that whereas notes
tend to seem to justify themselves as external indexes to the author's intention, yet they ought to be judged
like any other parts of a composition (verbal arrangement special to a
particular context), and when so judged their reality as parts of the poem,
or their imaginative integration with the rest of the poem, may come into
question. Mathiessen, for instance, sees that
Eliot's titles for poems and his epigraphs are informative apparatus, like
the notes. But while he is worried by some of the notes and thinks that Eliot
"appears to be mocking himself for writing the note at the same time
that he wants to convey

16

something by it," Matthiessen
believes that the "device" of epigraphs "is not at all open to
the objection of not being sufficiently structural." "The
intention," he says, "is to enable the poet to secure a condensed
expression in the poem itself ... .. In each case the epigraph is designed to form an integral part of
the effect of the poem." And Eliot himself, in his notes, has justified
his poetic practice in terms of intention.

The Hanged Man, a member of the
traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my
mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I
associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to
Emmaus in Part V.... The man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the
Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

And perhaps
he is to be taken more seriously here, when off guard in a note, than when in
his Norton Lectures he comments on the difficulty of saying what a poem means
and adds playfully that he thinks of prefixing to a second edition of Ash Wednesday some lines from Don Juan:

I don't pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when
I would be very fine; But the fact is that I have nothing planned Unless it were to be a moment merry.

If Eliot and other contemporary poets have any
characteristic fault, it may be in planning too much.

Allusiveness in poetry is one of
several critical issues by which we have illustrated the more abstract issue
of intentionalism, but it may be for today the most
important illustration. As a poetic practice allusiveness would appear to be
in some recent poems an extreme corollary of the romantic intentionalist
assumption, and as a critical issue it challenges and brings to light in a
special way the basic premise of intentionalism.
The following instance from the poetry of Eliot may serve to epitomize the
practical implications of what we have been saying. In Eliot's "Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," toward the end,
occurs the line: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,"
and this bears a certain resemblance to a line in a Song

17

by John Donne, "Teach me to heareMermaides singing,"
so that for the reader acquainted to a certain degree with Donne's poetry,
the critical question arises: Is Eliot's line an allusion to Donne's? Is Prufrock thinking about Donne? Is Eliot thinking about
Donne? We suggest that there are two radically different ways of looking for
an answer to this question. There is (1) the way of poetic analysis and
exegesis, which inquires whether it makes any sense if Eliot‑Prufrock is thinking about Donne. In an earlier part of
the poem, when Prufrock asks, "Would it have
been worth while, . . . To have squeezed the
universe into a ball," his words take half their sadness and irony from
certain energetic and passionate lines of Marvel "To His Coy
Mistress." But the exegetical inquirer may wonder whether mermaids
considered as "strange sights" (to hear them is in Donne's poem
analogous to getting with child a mandrake root) have much to do with Prufrock's mermaids, which seem to be symbols of romance
and dynamism, and which incidentally have literary authentication, if they
need it, in a line of a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval.
This method of inquiry may lead to the conclusion that the given resemblance
between Eliot and Donne is without significance and is better not thought of,
or the method may have the disadvantage of providing no certain conclusion.
Nevertheless, we submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism,
as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second
kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or genetic inquiry,
in which, taking advantage of the fact that Eliot is still alive, and in the
spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the critic writes to Eliot and asks
what he meant, or if he had Donne in mind We shall not here weigh the probabilities‑whether
Eliot would answer that he meant nothing at all, had nothing at all in mind ‑a
sufficiently good answer to such a question‑or in an unguarded moment
might furnish a clear and, within its limit, irrefutable answer. Our point is
that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem
"Prufrock"; it would not be a critical
inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way.
Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.

2.J. E. Spingarn, "The New Criticism," in Criticism in America(New York,
1924), 24-25.

3..Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,
"Intention," in American
Bookman, I (1944), 41-48.

4.
It is true that Croce himself in his Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille(London, 1920), chap. VII, "The
Practical Personality and the Poetical Personality," and in his Defence of Poetry (Oxford,
1933), 24, and elsewhere, early and late,delivered telling
attacks on emotive geneticism, but the main drive
of the Aestheticis surely
toward a kind of cognitive intentionalism.